Tag: complaint

Those who forget history . . .

Ford Posts Record Loss of $12.7 Billion – washingtonpost.com

The company’s strategy is built around catering to those new consumer demands and also shifting its assembly lines to use fewer unique engine and transmission combinations and more common “platforms.”

Is it any wonder that Ford sucks?  Henry Ford is nearly synonymous with “assembly line”, and yet Ford Motor Company can’t manage to reuse components and processes?  If there is a heaven, I’ll bet Henry Ford spends all his time up there jumping up and down and screaming at Ford MoCo executives for being so stupid.  They’ve taken the number two automobile company in the country and flushed it down the toilet because they forgot about the stuff that their founder figured out a hundred years ago.  They’re behind Toyota now worldwide, and will likely fall behind them in North America, too.

Can you imagine losing 12.7 billion dollars?  Can you imagine even looking at $12.7 billion?  Seriously, no one above middle management there should be taking a salary until the company breaks even.

Spammers need to die

I’ve had an Akismet spam filter on the comments here since right after I started the site last August.  It’s caught about 1500 spam comments in that time.  However, 600 of them are from the last three days, all with the same text in the comment.  It’s driving me insane.  A couple of them have even gotten through into my comment moderation queue.  Akismet has been great, but these people are relentless.  And I don’t get it – they have the same misspelling in each of the comments.  I don’t know why they misspell words.  Surely they must know that it tips off spam filters because all spammers seem to do it.  And I know many of them may not be native English speakers, but not using a spell checker seems strange.

Anyway, I hope all spammers get to spend eternity in a special hell where they must constantly read advertisements every time they try to do anything.  The ads can only be for mortgage refinancing, viagra, phone sex, and fake designer handbags.

Check out KZoo

100 ‘best communities’ for youths named – USATODAY.com

Kalamazoo, Michigan, my wife’s home town, was named on the 2007 list of “best communities for youths” by America’s Promise Alliance.  This is probably largely due to the Kalamazoo Promise – some wealthy person donated money to pay for Kalamazoo public school students to go to Michigan state schools free – if you go to public school in Kalamazoo, prorated for the number of years, you get free college if you stay in-state.  It’s pretty cool, and it’s raised property values inside the city limits.

I found that article looking for this one, which I saw on the front page while I was in line for coffee at Caribou.  Just as the wife and I are pretty close to putting a bid in on a condo in a “transitional” neighborhood of D.C., I see that crime rates are threatening the revitalization of many cities.  The article doesn’t mention D.C., focusing more on smaller cities that don’t have the money and the history of D.C. – Louisville, Milwaukee, Trenton.  Still.  Maybe my VA-based realtor (Who’s made because we’re buying in the city where she’s not licensed) is right that we’re going to be beaten and mugged three or four times a day in D.C..

One of the most important parts of the article is that “perception is reality” – when you’re talking about property values, it doesn’t matter what the real crime rate is.  It matters what people think the crime rate is.  Certainly the actual crime rate matters to those who live there, but attracting new people (and new money) requires that you appear to be safe.

I’ve always wondered, though – where do they expect people to go when the value of the neighborhood shoots up around them?  Certainly some will be able to take advantage of the rise in the value of their home.  But what if you rent?  What if you don’t want to go but suddenly your property tax triples?  I’m all for revitalizing cities, and I know that many new developments set aside (maybe they have to?  Not sure) some space for low-income residents.  But I’m not sure that’s enough.

And if some of the revitalization money comes from the government, I think we have a responsibility to make sure that what we’re doing is enough.

SNOW!!!!

As usual, the DC Metro area has officially flipped out because we got a little snow yesterday.  I’m the only one at work.  There are usually at least two people here by 6AM.  It’s a good thing I remembered my password to turn off the alarm.  Last time I had to open, I set it off and had to call Honeywell to reassure them that nothing horrible was happening.

It’s funny – I’ve heard two phones ring this morning, both belonging to people who are NEVER here this early.  One was my boss’ phone, and someone might be telling him that the scary wet roads are keeping them at home.  The roads were much worse last night.  The last mile before our place was a sheet of ice at about 4:30PM.  But this morning, the roads were just wet and a little slushy.  I had no trouble getting to work.

Bonds is a druggie, CEO of MLB players association a liar

SI.com – MLB – Caught speeding – Thursday January 11, 2007 3:09AM

“I can say unequivocally in my 22 years I’ve known Barry Bonds he has never blamed anyone for anything.”

So says Gene Orza.  A quick Google search for “barry bonds blame” turns up this:

“I’m tired of my kids crying. You wanted me to jump off a bridge, I finally did,” Bonds told reporters Tuesday, shortly after returning to training camp. “You finally brought me and my family down. … So now go pick a different person.”

So, maybe Orza was exaggerating a little.  Why do people make statements like that when they must know them to be false?

Anyway, Bonds is a jerk.  I don’t care how many home runs he hits or what his career stats look like when he finally retires.  He has made himself the poster child of everything that’s wrong with Major League Baseball.  It would make me very happy if he doesn’t break Hank Aaron’s record because he’s in jail for perjury.  That would be too awesome.

Kids, dont try this at home

I just posted about how much I hate elevators, and how I can’t take the stairs up at work because they lock the doors.  Well, they just started leaving the doors unlocked.  So now I don’t have to wait for the elevator when I come back from getting coffee!  I still can’t walk up from the parking garage, but that’s an extra three floors – I don’t feel bad riding the elevator up six flights.

Now, kids, here’s how you can complain about both sides of an issue.  It requires a delicate amount of self-deprecation, a little poetic license, and a flexible moral compass.  With practice, you, too, can become a professional complainer.  You must learn to deal with the classic complainer’s Catch-22. The problem now is that I have to walk up the dang stairs, or else I can no longer be smug about those who ride the elevators.  I just started going to the gym again last week after a month and a half off, and thirty five minutes on the elliptical makes your legs tired.  And now I have to walk up the stairs or risk invalidating a previous complaint.

Here’s where we redirect the complaint, taking the blame away from ourselves.

The building security people are clearly out to get me.  They must read the site, and know that they’ve come up against a formidable foe, a complainer with a mission and an audience.  So they have set out to undermine me.  They think they can respond to my complaint, and I’ll quietly continue to use the elevator, despite my protests.

_Finally, we say things that don’t mean much, but sound good on television, to leave the reader feeling inspired.  No one pays attention to the middle of something they read, just the beginning and the end. _

They will be disappointed.  I will take the stairs.  Two at a time, if necessary.  I will not be defeated!  They think they can grease the squeaky wheel and get away unscathed, but that is not the way the world works.  I’m on to you, building security.  I’m going to take the stairs every day, just to spite you.

Manhattan smells like gas

Mystery odor permeates Manhattan

“One thing we are very confident of, it’s not dangerous,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference.

We don’t know what it is, but we know it isn’t dangerous. Thanks, Mayor Bloomberg. Sorry to all of you who live in Manhattan. That’s got to be rough on you.

“If you were in a gas station, [the odor] would be magnified 1,000 times,” NEW JERSEY mayor’s spokeswoman Maria Pignataro told CNN.

At least it’s not terrorism. Not sure how they’re ruling that out without knowing what the smell is, but maybe they have advanced terrorism identification techniques that are too secret to inform the public of their existence.

I hate elevators

I have an irrational hatred for elevators.  I hate riding in them.  I hate looking at them.  I hate walking past people waiting for them.  In my office, we have six elevators and eleven floors.  Usually, that means you don’t wait long for an elevator.  I almost always take the stairs down, but you can’t take the stairs up because they lock the doors.  Only the lobby and basement doors open from the outside.

For the last two weeks, they’ve been taking one elevator out of service at a time to replace the doors.  Yes, I’m serious.  Currently, the elevator doors are a golden color, with a column of the same material that runs from the top of the door all the way to the ceiling.  These doors are being replaced in the lobby with silver colored mirrored doors that have stupid square patterns etched into them.  The first time I saw one, I thought it had been scratched as it opened.  They are not, however, replacing the panels above the doors.

So, now our lobby not only has marble walls with patterns that could only be described as six foot tall female genitalia, but it also has silver doors with gold trim.  Awesome.

And the elevators are slow.  I don’t see how taking one out of service quadruples the wait time, but it does.  Let’s do the math here.  Let’s say that the time I wait for an elevator is (# of people)/(# of elevators)(# of trips per elevator), or t=p/er.  Let’s call the time it normally takes t0, and the time it takes with one elevator out of service as tf (Where ‘f’ stands for you know what).  We can reasonably assume that p and r remain constant.  If tf=4t0, we do some algebra, and we determine that 4/e = (6/5)/e, or 4=6/5.  This is false.  Therefore, we have to assume that the elevators defy the laws of physics.

Actually, we should probably assume that t=p/er is incorrect.  Since taking 84% of e causes t to increase four fold, there must be something more sinister afoot here than that innocuous equation.  I suspect that natural logs are involved.

What have we done?

In the House, Suddenly Righteous Republicans

Anne Kornblut of the New York Times asked McHenry if his complaint might come across as whining.

“I’m not whining,” he whined.

So, when the Republicans were in power, Nancy Pelosi submitted a bill asking for fair treatment of the Democratic minority. The Republicans ignored it. Now, the Republicans are submitting the same bill with the roles reversed, and are mad that the Democrats aren’t jumping to do what they ask. The Republicans even had it delivered by a new member who could argue with something resembling a straight face that he had nothing to do with the Republicans actions a few years ago.

This is a pretty crappy thing to do on both sides, especially the Republicans. But the Washington Post has to go and ruin the article by the above quote. “Ooh, let’s call the Republicans ‘whiners’. That’ll show them.” On a related note – Cindy Sheehan is not helping anything. Defunding the Iraq war is the worst idea I’ve heard since someone thought, “Hey, it would be cool if George W. Bush was the President!”

I think my point here is that, when we “cleaned house” and got rid of some of the biggest problem Republicans in office, we seem to have replaced them with equally bad (though in different ways) Democrats. My mom doesn’t like Nancy Pelosi. And my mom has an incredible gift for finding the good in anyone, so if she can’t see anything positive in Nancy Pelosi, it’s probably not there.  And yes, I know my mom doesn’t know her personally, nor is she a professional political analyst. Actually, I don’t think I have a point. I’m just terribly frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be a single person anywhere in American politics who seems to represent my views. There’s no one I can get behind and say, “Hey, this person speaks for me”.  Am I asking too much?  Should the leaders I helped elect occasionally say things I agree with?  There are things I believe in on both sides of the political spectrum (Although not on the strange third axis of political thought where George W. Bush lives).

Is this my least coherent post ever?  Vote in the comments.  It’s not even 8:30AM. I swear I’m not drunk.